Premium-Friends System, lets everyone play DLC maps for free. Will be introduced on 30.3.2017

So I was reading some gaming news this morning and along with the reveal of the Battlefest content one thing struck my eye:

From tomorrow on we will get a Premium-Friends system that will allow everyone to play the DLC maps and modes, as long as one player in the party does have access to premium. Your friends however will not gain XP though, when playing on the new maps, and they will not get access to the weapons and vehicles. Hoewever the points are supposed to be saved and you get them later, if you do buy Premium (or I guess the DLC you were playing on). That about sums it up, but here is the (german) source on this:

Personally I think it is decent and fair system, to make sure the community does not get split up too much. This is indeed a community building feature, which is appreciated, because it does affect me possibly, since we started playing BF1 as a party of five, and three of us have not bought Premium, so possibly, if they would somehow find motivation and time for this game again, we could play together.
There are a couple of things I do not know though, and that is if the players can get battlepacks or are if they are shown in the scoreboard with titles and similar stuff as well, but I daresay it is a yes on both issues. Even if not it is rather minor. Also I do not know if these stats would be tracked, but I would think so too. So no progression through the ranks for these guys, but I do not think this would be a major hold-up.

The question is though, how many of you guys have friends that play BF regularly or want to come back to BF to play with you on the new maps? Are you guys playing with friends at all still? I play with one mate of my clan, but the others gre to hate this game deeply, I do not know if they'd come back just for social reasons. Other than that I might join servers with iota and c0llis if I see them playing, but I am pretty sure they are both Premium and it happens rarely as well.
Also excluding the new weapons is somewhat unfortunate, because I guess, that is what many guys play for as well.

The timing is a little unfortunate as well, as the first Premium DLC jsut came out and maybe some Premium buyers (and DLC buyers) feel ripped off, because otherwise they might not have bought the DLC or Premium, since their friends have Premium.

They could do a lot better. This is a split between Payday 2 and Civ 5 as it stands. In Payday if anyone had the content, anyone in the group could play it. In Civ 5, everyone had to own a specific DLC before even the owners of the DLC could use it (eg. if not everyone owns the Babylon civilization, nobody gets to play it).

By removing the xp gains from playing with friends, they're removing the carrot from the 'carrot on a stick' system that keeps people playing for unlock progression. Even if they promise to give it all back later if you spend money, that's a really poor way of going about it. They're effectively holding your unlock progress hostage if you want to keep playing with other people.

I can understand locking people out of weapons they didn't pay for, that much is obvious, but preventing the use of new vehicles, which are map assets, is asinine. This effectively means that any vehicle focused player who would like to take advantage of this system simply can't.

Quite hastily put together to encourage a 'try before you buy' feel from new content, but they should just advertise it as such in that case, as it stands now, they make it sound like a long term solution to otherwise splitting up the community, as every Battlefield DLC has done in the past.

The feeling of giving only Premium EXP on premium is a really bad move. They could do something like Point deduction for non-premium who play on those Premium maps and give back the point after they buy it.(Probably too hard to do in the game?)
The game handle their season pass best is R6S in my opinion. The content is for pass holder two weeks earlier and than become available for everyone(You need to buy new characters with in game money). I don't think BF can fully copy this method. The map is much larger and more in the number. And weapon... they are weapon for pass owner. The one they are trying right now is a really good step forward than what we have before.

This is an amazing thing to have, I never thought we'd get anything like this at all!

About the idea of Premium only giving early/direct access, and making everyone else grind for something, they could do that with the new Rank 10 guns: Give them directly to Premium players (provided they're Rank 10), while non-Premium would have to complete the assignments.

Aye, keeping xp hostage is an unnecessary addition, but the system is still a great step forwards to not splitting the community with DLC.

The xp thing is weird. Xp doesn't really count for anything once you have unlocked the things you will actually use (which can be done relatively quickly), but not getting xp is one things I believe a lot of the "regular" players do care about. Add to that the players who don't have premium are less likely to have grinded (/ground?) for long enough to be in a position where xp doesn't matter and the decisions seems even weirder.

Why not just settle for "you can play on the maps, but you can't use the guns or _spawn_ the unique vehicles"? Or just tack on some milder 0.25 or 0.5 xp multiplier? Getting new toys is a great motivator, especially of you get killed by them often (the "I die to it all the time, ergo it must be good/OP" line of reasoning).

Aye, keeping xp hostage is an unnecessary addition, but the system is still a great step forwards to not splitting the community with DLC.

The xp thing is weird. Xp doesn't really count for anything once you have unlocked the things you will actually use (which can be done relatively quickly), but not getting xp is one things I believe a lot of the "regular" players do care about. Add to that the players who don't have premium are less likely to have grinded (/ground?) for long enough to be in a position where xp doesn't matter and the decisions seems even weirder.

Why not just settle for "you can play on the maps, but you can't use the guns or _spawn_ the unique vehicles"? Or just tack on some milder 0.25 or 0.5 xp multiplier? Getting new toys is a great motivator, especially of you get killed by them often (the "I die to it all the time, ergo it must be good/OP" line of reasoning).

New tank is really, really good though. It's also the first time a DLC has added a new vehicle to the base game as a whole, which is really exciting.

New tank is really, really good though. It's also the first time a DLC has added a new vehicle to the base game as a whole, which is really exciting.

For me it really adds value to the expansion, I'm worried/curious to see how DICE will make the other expansions just as valued as so far TSNP has 6 out of the 20 new weapons(I really don't wanna count the MLE Extended but why would DICE throw it in as an extra?) and a whole new (very viable) tank.

There isn't many other tanks DICE could add, the planes we have basically cover every role you could ask for(unless they wanted to add a small blimp) and unless DICE want's to give every pack 5-6 guns(which wouldn't totally surprise but is improbable) at least one pack will only have 4 weapons.

New tank is really, really good though. It's also the first time a DLC has added a new vehicle to the base game as a whole, which is really exciting.

For me it really adds value to the expansion, I'm worried/curious to see how DICE will make the other expansions just as valued as so far TSNP has 6 out of the 20 new weapons(I really don't wanna count the MLE Extended but why would DICE throw it in as an extra?) and a whole new (very viable) tank.

There isn't many other tanks DICE could add, the planes we have basically cover every role you could ask for(unless they wanted to add a small blimp) and unless DICE want's to give every pack 5-6 guns(which wouldn't totally surprise but is improbable) at least one pack will only have 4 weapons.

I suppose they could add some gadgets.

They are definitely adding a blimp for the amphibious expansion.

I'm not a huge fan of the TSNP maps, so there is lots of room for great map content.